Landscape as Drawing

The course objective is to advance students\' visual skills in artistic representation and creative imagination through drawing.

Assigned projects will focus on both the natural and built environment, as well as on emotional perception, bodily experience and metaphoric interpretation of landscape.

This course focuses on mastering technical and artistic skills in hand drawing, refining sensitivity to all details of what one sees, and developing capacity to articulate it in a visually convincing and evocative form. Projects will include work in outdoor and indoor situations and places, and drawing
of life models.

In the process of drawing, students will focus on the world of lines, textures, shapes, light, shade and values. We will use various tools, materials and artistic techniques including: pencils, vine charcoal, conté pastels, markers, ink and other media, later combined with the use of camera, press imagery, computer renderings, etc. Drawing projects may include:

Strange and Uncanny Landscape: Drawing of landscapes with new unexpected, foreign, and strange elements added to them and aspects that \”ought to be hidden but came to light.\”

Atmospheric Landscape: Creation of drawings of landscapes in various atmospheric states: fog, rain, sun, at night, during the day, and in various seasons.

Time and Experience Landscape: Observation and visualization of the landscape that changes in time. Learning how to make a visual notation representation of experiencing landscape as a process that unfolds in time. This project will explore the relation of drawing to the visual methods of representation of time and events such as notation, charts, graphs, pictograms, diagrams, and storyboard.

Bodily Landscape: Drawing of the relation between human forms, gestures, and motion and forms of landscape captured by drawing of a human body in action in space, and experimentation with performative (bodily action driven) methods in making drawings.

Social Landscape: Drawing exploration of social relations of landscape, events, crowds, vehicular, pedestrian traffic, and visual traffic of signs and media advertising day and night.

During the course references will be made to historical approaches to landscape as in: